The market for public information displays has evolved considerably over the past years to include full motion video content combined with images and text displayed on high-resolution video graphics screens. It is becoming more and more common to see these kinds of digital signage systems in shopping centers, hotels, university campuses, and corporate lobbies. For the most part, the process of creating and managing content to be displayed on these screens has involved using standard graphics and video production tools to produce pre-rendered video clips that are then played back according to a predefined schedule or play list.
More recently, tools have become available that allow individual content elements such as graphics, animations, and video to be dynamically composited and rendered into a video stream in real-time, without requiring the need for pre-rendering all content into a single video file. This allows independent elements or layers of content to be changed “on the fly” in response to specific data conditions. In a typical example, a weather display could automatically show the latest temperature and meteorological conditions throughout the day while the latest news headlines scroll in a ticker at the bottom of the screen. As the weather changes or breaking news becomes available, the content on the screen is automatically updated.
Whereas conventional digital signage systems have used DVD players or other simple video playback systems to display pre-rendered content, real-time digital signage systems utilize more advanced computer and video hardware and specialized software to dynamically render content elements on demand. These real-time systems have the major advantage of being able to instantly update screen content in response to manual or automatic triggers, unlike the conventional video playback systems which require an entire video clip to be re-rendered every time content needs to be updated. This greatly reduces production times and network bandwidth required to distribute content for playback in multiple locations, resulting in content that is more dynamic and visually appealing to the audience.
A major drawback of real-time digital signage tools is that they require a greater amount of development effort to create video and graphics content and integrate this content with real-time data sources. This translates into higher operating costs, making the return on investment for this type of digital signage system less attractive for many applications, despite the clear benefits to the audience in terms of more interesting and engaging content.
The process of creating real-time data-driven graphics for digital signage typically requires 4 primary steps: 1) Creation of graphical and video elements by a graphic artist; 2) Development of custom software applications or scripts by a software programmer to link graphical elements to data sources; 3) Distribution of graphical elements and software applications to final play-out locations using either a local or wide-area network, or a manual distribution medium such as CD-ROM; and 4) Monitoring and updating of system elements on an ongoing basis.
The currently available tools and systems provide a means for achieving each of these steps, but for the most part require a level of specialized knowledge that the average user must acquire through extensive training and hands-on experimentation.